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4 decades later, new trial of alleged 1980 Paris synagogue bomber offers victims opportunity for closure
PARIS (JTA) — The courtroom was crowded but the defendant’s seat was empty on Monday as a landmark trial in French Jewish history got underway, nearly 43 years after the synagogue bombing that Hassan Diab stands accused of orchestrating.
An arrest warrant in the 1980 bombing that killed four people and wounded 46 was first issued for Diab, a Lebanese academic who lives in Canada, in 2008. Only now is a trial getting underway — and he has chosen not to attend, prompting criticism from both prosecutors and French Jews who are hoping for a sense of resolution after decades of trauma.
“Hassan Diab’s decision not to appear before your court is a great disgrace to your jurisdiction,” the attorney general said during the first day of the trial, during a discussion of whether an arrest warrant should be issued, a move that would require the trial to be dismissed.
“Which human would not make the same decision?” replied Diab’s lawyer, William Bourdon, about his client’s choice not to travel to France to stand trial. “This decision is humanly respectable. It is in no way a sign of cowardice.”
The Reform synagogue on Rue Copernic that was bombed is nested in the heart of a wealthy residential area, in Paris’ 16th arrondissement. A visitor today would not be able to tell that the ceiling had once been shattered into a million little pieces, that the floor had been spotted with blood. If not for the commemorative plaque at the entrance, nothing there would show the synagogue was once the scene of a deadly terrorist attack.
Yet the trial is freighted with the fear and anxiety that set in after what is now known as the Rue Copernic bombing on Oct. 3, 1980, understood to be the first fatal antisemitic attack in France since the Holocaust. Since then, a string of antisemitic attacks on communal targets and individuals have caused many French Jews to feel afraid, both about their personal vulnerability and about the state’s commitment to their safety.
But while the prosecution of some potentially antisemitic attacks has not always satisfied French Jews, the long ordeal to bring Diab to trial suggests great diligence on the part of many involved.
Bernard Cahen, an attorney for the synagogue and one of the victims, who is now in his 80s, promised he would see this case through until the end.
“Whatever the outcome, this has been going on for way too long,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview, adding with a joke, “Everybody is surprised I’m still here to represent my clients.”
Cahen represents Monique Barbé, who lost her husband in the bombing when she was 37. Now nearly 80 and living in the South of France, Barbé won’t be coming to the trial.
“I don’t have the strength. But I can’t wait for all of this to end,” she told JTA.
About 300 worshippers were attending the Shabbat service and celebrating five bar mitzvahs that Friday evening when, at 6:35 p.m., a bomb exploded right outside the synagogue. The door was blown up, the glass ceiling collapsed on the worshippers; wooden benches were projected across the room.
Outside the synagogue the scene was even more gruesome. In his book about the case, the French journalist Jean Chichizola described “cars thrown on the road like children’s toys,” “flames licking the upper floors of adjacent buildings” and “shop windows blown up all along the street.”
In what looked like a war zone lay four bodies. Israeli TV journalist Aliza Shagrir, 44, was hit by the blast as she walked by. Philippe Boissou, 22, who was riding by on his motorcycle, also died on the spot. Driver Jean-Michel Barbé was found dead in his car, which was parked right outside the synagogue where he was awaiting clients attending the service. Nearby, a hotel worker named Hilario Lopes-Fernandez was seriously injured and died two days later.
Investigators quickly established that the bomb had been placed in the saddlebag of a Suzuki motorcycle parked in front of the synagogue. It was meant to go off precisely as the worshippers left the building, which would undoubtedly have killed many more people. But the ceremony had started a few minutes late.
At first, a man close to a neo-Nazi group claimed responsibility for the attack, misleading investigators for months before confessing he had nothing to do with it. The attack was ultimately attributed to an extremist group in the Middle East, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations, and investigators alleged that Diab had planted the bomb. After an arrest warrant was issued in 2008, he was extradited from Canada in 2014, indicted in Paris and imprisoned.
But in a surprise to many, Diab’s case was dismissed in 2018, allowing him to return to Canada a free man. Prosecutors appealed, leading to another surprising turn of events in 2021 as the court upheld the earlier decision, directing Diab to stand trial after all.
“This is a gaping wound for the Jewish community and here in France people remember this horrible attack,” historian Marc Knobel told JTA. “Let us not forget how shocked and hurt we all were at the time.”
Indeed, outrage in the immediate aftermath of the bombing was fierce. France’s major trade unions called for a nationwide strike as a gesture of solidarity with Jews, while government ministers promised a speedy response and deployed police officers to other Jewish sites. Meanwhile, Jews marched in the streets, some vowing to take security into their own hands, in a demonstration that presaged longstanding tensions within French Jewry.
Over four decades later, Monique Barbé reflected on the tragedy that has changed her life forever.
“This has ruined my life. I was nervously wrecked for a very long time,” she said. “Imagine, I had to go identify my husband’s body. At the police station, they gave me back his half-burnt ID card and his damaged wedding ring. That’s all I was left with.”
But she questioned exactly how much the bombing and trial should register for people whose connection is more distant than her own.
“I do believe this is a necessary trial but except for those who lost their loved ones, I don’t see why anybody would still think about it today, it’s been so long,” Barbé said. “Plus there have been so many terrorist attacks since.”
Jean-François Bensahel, president of the Copernic synagogue, thinks this trial is actually of great importance even to those who were not born at the time of the attack.
“It’s engraved in our community’s history,” he said in an interview. “It’s difficult for us to understand why Hassan Diab has decided not to come to the trial but nothing is over yet. I want to trust justice will be served.”
The attack’s most lasting effects may not be in the trial but in the heavy security infrastructure that is now familiar to anyone engaging with French Jewish institutions, Bensahel said.
“Sadly, synagogues in France (and many other places) are all under protection, even though it’s completely counterintuitive to have security measures in a place of worship where you usually aspire to peace,” he said. “It shows something is not right with the world.”
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Marilyn Monroe would be 100 today. Are we making too much of her conversion?
Back in 2019, Marilyn Monroe’s menorah, a gift from her former in-laws, sold at auction for more than $112,000. The candle in the wind jokes wrote themselves, but how exactly the tragic actress lived her life has long been a point of Jewish fascination.
The effort to make Monroe a Jewish icon is almost certainly strained, though not baseless.
Born Norma Jean Mortenson, she converted to Judaism in 1956 ahead of her nuptials with Arthur Miller. That this detail still commands such attention can’t easily be divorced from certain stereotypes of their mismatched pairing: the beauty and the brain. He, balding and bespectacled, she, a peroxide paragon of bombshell beauty. Philip Roth didn’t need to write about it — Joyce Carol Oates did instead.
But Monroe’s attachment to Judaism, beyond leaving behind such effects as the menorah and an annotated siddur (sold for $21,000 in 2018), may be overstated, even as she continued to identify as a “Jewish atheist” after her 1961 split with Miller. That she engaged with her lessons with some seriousness, according to the rabbi who converted her, may be more a testament to her curiosity and intelligence than a true demonstration of faith.
In 2015, the Jewish Museum in New York offered a useful contrast. An exhibition hosted Andy Warhol’s portraits of Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor presented as a diptych. Taylor’s conversion came about after the death of a Jewish husband and remained important to her through the rest of her life, extending to pro-Israel causes and activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry. (Taylor was buried by a rabbi, Monroe by a Lutheran minister.)
Both women had their films banned in Egypt on account of their adopted faith — in the case of Taylor, this meant completing Cleopatra in Rome. Only one could be said to have lived a thoroughly Jewish life, though Monroe’s death is certainly a mitigating factor, the subject of so many “what ifs.”
When we look at Marilyn as a coreligionist, it may say more about us than her. I suspect the fact she didn’t “look Jewish” is what makes her affiliation matter to so many.
But the affiliations that truly matter are in the credits: Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis, Charles Lederer, Lee Strasberg. The work, or Avodah, is captured in celluloid: the way Sugar Kane takes a belt from her flask and tucks it in her garter or Lorelei Lee swats at her suitors with a fan.
It is Marilyn, not Norma Jean, not Miriam bat Sarah, who continues to have immense cultural cachet, already long exceeding her brief time on earth.
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Retracing the epic journey of the world’s oldest Jew
I, A Wandering Jew. A Five-Century History of our Modern Condition
Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press, 272 pages, $29.95.
My father, an American-born son of Belarusian immigrants, bought the record when it first came out in 1960 and we enjoyed listening to it to no end. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s album The 2,000 Year Old Man featured Brooks as a somewhat laconic old man who responded in Yiddish-inflected English to Reiner’s guileless questions about his long life.
The improvised sketch had apparently begun 10 years earlier, when Reiner, who worked with Brooks on a TV show, turned to him, while testing a new tape-recorder, and asked, “Is it true you were at the scene of the Crucifixion, 2000 years ago?” Jesus Christ, Brooks quipped, was a “nice boy, wore sandals.” William Shakespeare, however, had “the worst penmanship” and when asked if he knew Joan of Arc, Brooks blurted out, “Knew her? I dated her!”
As a kid of 9, I didn’t think that their shtick was anything other than funny. But in retrospect, I can see that the Yiddishkeit tone and audacity of the conceit also answered something bigger and much more sinister. The Shoah had only just ended, the weekend before, as it were. So, the immortality and know-it-all comedy of Brooks’ hero expressed resiliency and social integration in the face of nothing less than genocide. “The 2000 Year Old Man” was, in a Borscht Belt voice, an affirmation of life. My fondness for Brooks resurfaced during the haze of high school, and remained in the back of my mind as decades went by, but it wasn’t until reading Yair Mintzker’s new book, I, Wandering Jew, that I came to appreciate another dimension of its significance, namely, its evocation of the figure of the Wandering Jew.
Originally, the Wandering Jew was an antisemitic trope Christians used to explain the marginality and foreignness of Jews in European society. A cobbler stood at the doorstep of his Jerusalem shop, according to the story, as Jesus labored by, hauling his burden to his death. Refusing his request for help, Jesus cursed the cobbler, who inexplicably came to be known as Ahasverus, the name of a Persian king, to live eternally in exile until the Second Coming. The Jews were thus condemned to a de-territorialized, homeless fate as Christ deniers.
Ahasverus appears and reappears in various forms over the course of European history — often as a tall, severe man who spoke several languages, never laughed and criticized people for moral failures. His story spread in ballads, poems and novels — and eventually in Nazi propaganda — to support the claim that Jews were not only alien to European culture and society but could never live together with Aryans.
Mintzker, a Princeton history professor, has written an intriguing book that traces the legend of the Wandering Jew over the centuries in reverse chronological order, eventually to arrive at the salience of the figure’s story in the author’s own life and times.
The first of his five examples is set in Israel, just a few years after the nation achieved independence, when a mysterious man, known by some as Ben Shoushan, caught the attention of a journalist as he disembarked at the port of Haifa with a forged Moroccan passport that dated his birth in 1902. He seemed to be both middle-aged and ageless, perhaps mad or possibly a genius. The author Eli Weisel had met him at one point immediately after the war and also couldn’t quite make sense of who he was — perhaps a “Kabbalist, comedian and anarchist”? The mystery man, lacking an origin or an income, claimed to speak 30 languages and was said to love riddles.
He spent time in two religious kibbutzim near Tel Aviv. The kibbutzniks recalled him as a harsh, unbearable, eccentric man who lectured on the Talmud, rotating between the communities until he was expelled from both. Leaving Israel in 1956, he was spotted in a Jewish community in Uruguay, where he was regarded as a Wandering Jew, an identity he apparently embraced. In other words, Shoushan was at once a real person, in Mintzker’s view, who also seemed to project a post-Holocaust trope, as of the survival of the Jewish stranger but also the survival of the unconventional Jewish intellectual.
Another version appeared in The Nag, which was an allegorical, 1873 Russian novel by Sholem Yakev Abramovitch in which a broken-down, talking horse declares herself to be a “wandering mare” and demands justice rather than mercy from her tormentors. Abramovitch’s image of the Wandering Jew was somewhat veiled, although the reticent, pitiful animal does admit to being both a horse, passing from one harness to another, and something else. Unable to live or die, she says she wants only to belong — but is dismissed as not human.
In Jewish Memorabilia, Jacob Schudt, who was a Protestant scholar from Frankfurt, adopted the sort of doctrinal view of the legend that the eternal exile of the Jews from Israel was a punishment for having rejected Christ. The final installment of the four-volume work apparently brimmed with antisemitic views that criticized how Jews looked, their lack of hygiene, and purported greed, as well as their supposed penchant for self-flattery. Schudt dismissed the Wandering Jew as nothing more than a fable by which the lower classes could perceive and understand Jews. Yet he also recognized certain flaws in the story — that it contradicted Christ’s compassion, for one. Lacking historical support, Schudt went on to conclude that the story was probably of Catholic origin, or perhaps the result of nothing more than a publisher’s money-making scheme. The figure of Ahasverus, in other words, was a contradiction that featured a real personage who simultaneously never existed.
Mintzker then turns to the centerpiece of the story, an anonymous German broadsheet, the Kurtze Beschreibung, which was a wildly popular text that was first published in 1602 and then republished a dozen times throughout the rest of the century.
It cast Ahasverus as a strange man who met a Lutheran theologian and explained to him that he was a Jewish shoemaker who had been born 1,500 years earlier in Jerusalem, when and where he had refused to help Christ on his way to the Crucifixion and had been cursed to wander the earth until the return of the Messiah. The account included details of the Crucifixion, the deaths of the Apostles, and about Ahasverus himself — for example that he spoke German with a Saxon accent.
Mintzker strives to pin down the author of the pamphlet and how its contents changed over the course of the 17th century. He marshals quite a bit of detailed evidence that leads him to conclude that Paul von Eitzen, a leading a 16th century Lutheran official and contentious pastor in Hamburg who claimed to have met Ahasverus in the 1540s, must have written it. Readers of the pamphlet, Mintzker also notes, would certainly have been able to identify both von Eitzen and the man he called Ahasverus in this version of the story, who was likely a notoriously uncompromising anti-Calvinist named Tilemann Heshusius.
In the final chapter of his well-paced book, Mintzker turns his gaze upon himself — to the meaning of the Wandering Jew in his own life as a yored, an Israeli expatriate.
Mintzker was born and raised in an upper middle-class, progressive Ashkenazi family in Jerusalem, but eventually left the country to go study and then work in the United States. He had learned about Ahasverus from a close high school friend but only came to identify with him in New Jersey, where the image of exile, and of Jews as “eternal strangers,” haunted him and became more and more salient, particularly amid the violence of the past few years in Israel. With the rise of anti-Zionism, Mintzker admits, he came to “embrace the figure of Ahasverus … as a model for political life” but also for his own sense of self.
The 2,000 Year Old Man clearly echoed the legend of the Wandering Jew, in a chutzpadik voice that entertained diaspora American Jews during the immediate post-Holocaust years. But wasn’t this precisely Mintzker’s point? The trope’s meaning, as his book shows us, shifted across time and place. Thus, in this last expression, he comes to own it as an acknowledgement of his own disquiet and alienation, which he connects to his yored autobiography and recent events in Israel that have called Zionism into question. In doing so, the story of the Wandering Jew has shed its antisemitic, racialized roots, or justification for exile once again, to be read anew as a trope of Mintzker’s (and perhaps our) estrangement from contemporary Israeli society. A timely read.
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The mayor missed the Israel Day Parade. Many who went didn’t miss him.
(JTA) — The energy was palpable Sunday as thousands packed a dozen blocks of Fifth Avenue waving Israeli flags for New York’s annual Israel Day Parade. Organizers said the turnout was the largest in the event’s six-decade history.
The procession featured its usual mix of Jewish nonprofits, schools and synagogues marching to blaring Israeli music alongside parade floats sponsored by groups including Nefesh B’Nefesh, the UJA Federation of New York and the Maccabiah Games.
But this year’s parade, which was themed “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists,” unfolded amid growing political polarization over Israel and without New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who became the first mayor in decades to skip the event.
For all the criticism Mamdani has received over his campaign pledge not to attend the event, many of those who did turn out told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency they were glad he wasn’t there.
“He doesn’t like us,” said Andrea Roman, who attended the parade wearing an Israeli flag cape and thought it was “good” that Mamdani hadn’t come. “Why should you be some place where you don’t like? He does not promote peace. This promotes peace, but of course he’s not going to be here.”
Jeremy Bell, 39, also said wasn’t bothered by the mayor’s absence – and that there were many more who felt as he did.
“I don’t think that he was really wanted here,” Bell said, adding, “I don’t want to be here with someone who doesn’t believe in our right to exist and obviously associates with people that don’t have our best interests in mind.”
Despite Mamdani’s absence, the event, known as the largest pro-Israel parade in the world, featured a lengthy roster of political officials and lawmakers. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler were among those in attendance, as were former New York City Mayors Eric Adams and Mike Bloomberg.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who on Thursday said that security preparations for the parade would be “the most extensive” that the NYPD had ever put together, also joined the festivities as an honorary grand marshal.
While many paradegoers said that they never considered staying home because of security concerns, several said they appreciated the presence of thousands of police officers and extensive barricades that blocked the streets surrounding the event.
“We are grateful that tens of thousands of participants and spectators were able to gather safely and proudly in the heart of New York City,” Mitchell Silber, the CEO of the Community Security Initiative, said in a statement. “Today’s success reflects the extraordinary planning, coordination, and professionalism of the NYPD and our law enforcement partners.”
That number was boosted in some cases by participants who said the mayor’s decision to skip the event factored into their own decision to come.
Karene Hermon, 22, said that while previously she would have been more “neutral” about attending, hearing that Mamdani had chosen not to come drove her to “be with my people.”
“I think it sends the wrong message,” Hermon said of the mayor’s refusal to participate. “I think we’re trying to come together, not separate people, regardless of … how you feel about a cause.”
First-time paradegoer Luis Margules travelled to the march from Pennsylvania. He said that he had come because it felt like “a moment to be with Israel.”
“This is my first parade, but I think this year it’s one of the most important ones,” Margules said. “I think the world doesn’t understand the situation with Iran and the Palestinians, and everything is blamed on Israel.”
Ofir Akunis, the consul general of Israel in New York, said in a statement that the parade “delivered a resounding answer to all those who hate Israel.”
“This year’s parade was an unprecedented demonstration of strength by New York’s Jewish community and the people of Israel,” Akunis said. “It sends a clear and unequivocal message: We are here to stay, and we are not going anywhere.”
But not all of the spectators Sunday were there in support.
While there was no large-scale protest visible during the parade, roughly 25 people demonstrated along the route to oppose the inclusion of a record delegation of roughly 10 Israeli Knesset members, including far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and two members of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit party.
As the delegation passed the demonstration, which was organized by the progressive groups Israelis for Peace and Friends of Standing Together New York, protesters shouted “shame” and “war criminals,” according to Tamar Glezerman, an organizer for Israelis for Peace.
“We were there to protest against the Israeli Knesset delegation, the largest of its size of all of the parades, that sent members of the coalition and the so-called opposition to do hasbara and march victoriously up a New York avenue,” Glezerman told JTA in a phone interview Sunday, using the Hebrew word for public relations.
While the focus of the demonstration centered on opposing the Knesset delegation, Glezerman added that “a parade that very much champions unexamined, unchecked and non-critical support of Israel is perhaps important for people here. It is not good for Israelis. It sure as hell isn’t good for Palestinians.”
Margules, in contrast, said that seeing the Israeli Knesset members pass by had made him feel “proud.”
“It’s good to know that even in these dark times we can still be together without violence, and we can disagree on many things, but we have to agree on something,” Margules said. “We are here because Israel exists.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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